ETH releases ORCA Hand v1 open‑source
ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab published ORCA Hand v1 — a fully open-source, 17‑DOF tendon-driven, 3D‑printable hand with silicone skin, tactile sensing and a reported 10.5 kg grip capacity, demonstrated doing tasks like screw‑driving. It’s a ready-made hardware and control stack for motion-control and embedded-sensing projects announced.
The ORCA v1 paper lists Clemens C. Christoph, Maximilian Eberlein and others and was accepted for presentation at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China (arxiv.org). The team reports a material bill-of‑materials below 2,000 CHF and single‑person assembly under eight hours for a complete ORCA v1 build (arxiv.org). ORCA passed an uninterrupted durability run of more than 10,000 cycles — roughly 20 hours of continuous operation — during validation tests described in the paper (arxiv.org). Assembly documentation and workshop slides show labeled Dynamixel servos in the parts/assembly flow and step‑by‑step spool and servo attachment instructions for the tendon spooling mechanism (rwr.ethz.ch). The software stack includes an orca_core Python controller with built‑in tensioning and calibration scripts, a ROS2 example package (rwr_system) for teleoperation/data collection, and an orca_retargeter repo for teleoperation retargeting — all hosted on the ORCA GitHub org. (github.com). Core packages are published to PyPI (orca_core released 30 Jun 2025) and the orca_core repo shows public activity and 177 stars on GitHub, indicating an actively maintained open‑codebase and community uptake (pypi.org).
